Progress Daily

The ultimatum game brings out conflicting impulses: a researcher offers two players a set amount of money and explains that if they agree on how to divvy it up they will keep that money for themselves. If they don’t, neither will get anything. One player then offers the other a split. Most players reject a patently unfair division — such as offering only $4 out of a total of $20. Yet, self interest would argue that even $4 is better than nothing, which is what will otherwise result.

Daria Knoch and economist Ernst Fehr studied 52 young men in the ultimatum game. The researchers specified the amounts that could be offered - ranging from four to 10 Swiss francs out of 20 - and had computers randomly select some of the offers. This helped distinguish between the recipients demand for reciprocity - only applicable when another human being is in control - and a general resistance to unfair offers. The scientists divided the recipients into 3 groups: those who would receive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to suppress electrical activity in the right side of their prefrontal cortices, those who would receive the treatment on the left side and, as controls, those who would receive no stimulation.

45% of the men who experienced TMS on the right side of their prefrontal cortex accepted the most unfair offers - a split of 16 to 4 - compared with just 15% of those whose left side had been stimulated and 9% of the controls. 37% of those who underwent right side stimulation accepted all unfair offers - judged as any split less than 10 to 10 - whereas no one was so accepting in the other groups. And they made the decision to accept an unfair offer as quickly as a fair one, while their colleagues needed much longer to decide. This marks the first time that brain researchers have controlled a specific behavior by using TMS on a specific region of the brain. It takes at least 15 minutes of direct application to the skull to induce the changes, and they only last a short while.

“Selfish Impulse Set Free by Magnetic Pulse to Brain,” by David Biello

In a 2004 study by Drew Westen partisan Democrats and Republicans were presented with threatening information about Bush and Kerry, while researchers watched what their brains did in response.

Subjects were first presented a slide showing something good about the subject’s candidate, then the next slide presented the candidate contradicting himself. The subjects were then asked to consider whether or not there was a contradiction.

The brain regions that are active during reasoning tasks were mostly inactive. What turned on instead were circuits involved in emotion, particularly distress, and emotional regulation.

“Emotion Trumps Logic in the Voting Booth,” by Terrence McNally

A massive new study by Robert Putnam, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has found that found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities. Residents were sorted into the 4 principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships.

More diverse communities tend to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents — all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have. But even after statistically taking these factors into account, the connection remains strong: those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

Levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

In a recent study, Edward Glaeser and Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population.

Matthew Kahn and Dora Costa reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

“The Downside of Diversity,” by Michael Jonas

From the Stone Age to 1800, there was no gain in average living conditions. Now incomes rise steadily.

The average Briton in 1788 ate only as many calories a day as hunter-gatherers (2,300). And the British diet was more monotonous. Life expectancy was only slightly above that of hunter-gatherers (38 years). Height is a good guide to nutrition and health: men in England averaged 5ft 6in, the same as males in the Stone Age. Men then worked 60 hours a week. Compared to hunter-gatherers’ 35 hours.

Englishmen who were economically successful, from the Middle Ages to 1800, left 4 or 5 surviving children at their deaths. In contrast, landless labourers left fewer than 2 children.

Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the preindustrial economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy to find work. Attributes that ensured later economic dynamism – hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education – were thus spread throughout the population.

From 1200 to 1800 interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, the taste for violence declined, and numeracy and literacy spread to even the lower reaches of society.

In both preindustrial Japan and China the rich had more children than the poor, but in a more modest way. The samurai in Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603-1868), for example, produced on average little more than one son per father.

In modern affluent societies, the higher income a person has, on average, the less leisure he has. The source of our compulsion to work may lie in our ancestors’ passage through a preindustrial world that rewarded a compulsion to work and accumulate with reproductive success.

“England’s success may be in our genes,” Gregory Clark

In the ultimatum game, 2 players, a proposer and a responder, divide a reward. The responder can either accept the proposer’s division or reject it. If he rejects it, both players receive nothing.

Scores of studies have run the ultimatum game across cultures and ages. Universally, people reject any share lower than 20% — apparently to punish the greed of the proposer.

A study by Björn Wallace, et al (”Heritability of ultimatum game responder behavior“), suggests that the sense of fairness is rooted in genetics.

Wallace played the ultimatum game with twins. He neutralized the effect of upbringing and exposed that of genetics by comparing identical twins (who share all their genes) with fraternal twins (who share half).

Each twin of a pair played the ultimatum game, both as proposer and as responder. In the case of identical twins, there was a striking correlation between the average division that each member of a pair proposed and also between what they were willing to accept. In other words, their senses of what was fair were similar. No such correlations were seen in the behaviour of fraternal twins.

“Patience, fairness and the human condition,” The Economist

Wage gaps between rich and poor nations are huge. A migrant from Guatemala to the US increases her income by a factor of 6 (PPP adjusted). From Kenya to the UK is a factor of 7; from Vietnam to Japan, a factor of 9.

A century ago, factors of 3 were sufficient to spark the migration that helped build America and partially empty Ireland, Italy and Poland.

Book review. No, not THAT book,” Ethan Zuckerman’s review of Lant Pritchett’s Let Their People Come

Zindel Segal, Helen Mayberg, etc., had 14 depressed adults undergo cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which teaches patients to view their own thoughts differently — to see a failed date, for instance, not as proof that “I will never be loved” but as a minor thing that didn’t work out. Thirteen other patients received paroxetine (generic Paxil). All experienced comparable improvement after treatment. Brain scans showed that the patients responded differently to the 2 kinds of treatment: CBT muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic and higher thought (as well as of endless rumination). Paroxetine, by contrast, raised activity there. On the other hand, CBT raised activity in the hippocampus of the limbic system, the brain’s emotion center. Paroxetine lowered activity there. As Mayberg explains, “Cognitive therapy targets the cortex, the thinking brain, reshaping how you process information and changing your thinking pattern. It decreases rumination, and trains the brain to adopt different thinking circuits.”

Greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex than in the right correlates with a higher baseline level of contentment. The relative left/right activity is seen as a marker for the happiness set point, since people tend to return to this level no matter whether they win the lottery or lose their spouse.

Richard J. Davidson wondered if mental training could produce changes that underlie enduring happiness. To find out he (with the help of the Dalai Lama) recruited Buddhist monks to meditate inside his functional magnetic resonance imaging tube while he measured their brain activity during various mental states. For comparison, he used undergraduates who had had no experience with meditation but got a crash course in the basic techniques. During the generation of pure compassion, a standard Buddhist meditation technique, brain regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter.

The monks showed a significantly greater activation in a brain network linked to empathy and maternal love. Connections from the frontal regions to the brain’s emotional regions seemed to become stronger with more years of meditation practice, as if the brain had forged more robust connections between thinking and feeling.

While the monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left prefrontal (the site of activity that marks happiness) swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity. The undergraduate controls showed no such differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests that the positive state is a skill that can be trained.

“How The Brain Rewires Itself,” by Sharon Begley

Meditators sometimes identify the negative emotions they are feeling in order to free themselves of them, and brain scans have recently shown that this process calms the part of the brain associated with emotional processing.

Matthew Lieberman hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, & asked them to look at pictures of faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion — such as “angry” or “fearful” — or 2 possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region — an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences — became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes — indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference — the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

“Brain Scans Show Meditation’s Effects,” by Melinda Wenner

Correspondent inference theory: people tend to infer the motives of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors.

This makes evolutionary sense. In a world of simple actions and base motivations, it allows a creature to rapidly infer the motivations of another creature. (He’s attacking me because he wants to kill me.)

One place it fails is in our response to terrorism. Because terrorism often results in the horrific deaths of innocents, we mistakenly infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of the terrorist, and not the means to a different end.

Max Abrahms (”Why Terrorism Does Not Work” — .PDF file here) analyzes the political motivations of 28 terrorist groups: the complete list of “foreign terrorist organizations” designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. He lists 42 policy objectives of those groups, and found that they only achieved them 7% of the time.

According to the data, terrorism is more likely to work if 1) the terrorists attack military targets more often than civilian ones, and 2) if they have minimalist goals like evicting a foreign power from their country or winning control of a piece of territory, rather than maximalist objectives like establishing a new political system in the country or annihilating another nation. But even so, terrorism is a pretty ineffective means of influencing policy.

“Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed.”

In other words, terrorism doesn’t work, because it makes people less likely to acquiesce to the terrorists’ demands, no matter how limited they might be: people don’t believe those limited demands are the actual demands.

“The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail,” by Bruce Schneier

Alan B Krueger examined 781 terrorist incidents the US state department deemed “significant,” & found that the attackers were from countries with political oppression, not poverty. Some 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September 2001 came from wealthy families in a prosperous country - Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden’s background was opulent; Ayman al-Zawahiri is an affluent paediatrician.

The poorest countries, such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Liberia, have experienced vicious conflict, but little terrorism.

“Don’t blame the poor,” by Salil Tripathi